The MMS, which is a further development of the Short Message Service (SMS) and the Enhanced Message Service (EMS), provides an integrated end-to-end solution for personal multimedia mobile communication service. FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram illustrating the architecture of an MMS system in the related art. As shown in FIG. 1, the user side mainly includes a Wireless Email Terminal and an MMS User Agent on an MMS User Terminal. The network side mainly comprises an MMS Center (MMSC), a Value Added Service Applications Server and an External Server.
In the Network Elements of the foregoing network side, the MMSC is the core of the MMS system. The MMSC is used for carrying out the protocol transformation, content adaptation, storing and scheduling for Multimedia Messages, passing the Multimedia Message among different multimedia devices, and moreover storing the user information, customized information, and the interface information, etc.; the Value Added Service Applications Server, generally a Service Provider (SP) or a Content Provider (CP), is used to provide the Value Added Service of the MMS. Particularly, an MM7 interface, which usually takes the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as the bearer protocol, is used to carry out the interaction between the MMSC and the SP.
If a message is to be sent from a User Terminal to a user of a certain SP, the message should firstly be sent to the MMSC via the User Agent, and then is transmitted to the home SP corresponding to the receiver of the message. Herein the home SP of the receiver means that the receiver is the service user of the home SP. For instance, supposing that the receiver is an Instant Message (IM) client on the Internet, the home SP of the receiver is an IM server.
In some services, there may be two or more than two receivers of the message sent by the User Agent; further more, among these receivers, there may be two or more that two receivers corresponding to an identical home SP. Under the condition, the flow of interaction between the User Agent, the MMSC and the SP is illustrated in FIG. 2. It is assumed that there are two receivers of the message and that the home SP of the two receivers is the same SP. The flow comprises the following steps.
Step 201˜Step 202: the User Agent submits the message to the MMSC via an MM1_submit.REQ of the MM1 interface protocol, wherein the two receivers, Recv1 and Recv2, are the service users of the same SP; after the MMSC receiving the MM1_submit.REQ, the MMSC returns a response to the User Agent via an MM1_submit.RES.
Step 203˜Step 204: the MMSC resolves the message, determines that there are two receivers of the message, thus makes one copy of the message; the two messages are delivered to the same SP via two MM7_deliver.REQs which both carry the two receiver addresses carried in MM1_submit.REQs; then the SP returns an MM7_deliver.RES to the MMSC, denoting that the SP has successfully received the two MM7_deliver.REQs and will process them.
As described above, when a message includes at least two receivers and the home SP of at least two receivers is the same one, the home SP would receive at least two MM7_deliver.REQs; and each MM7_deliver.REQ includes the addresses of all the receivers. In the method of the SP to process the message, the SP processes the message based on the address in the address field of the receiver, and if there are multiple addresses in the address field, the SP processes the message based on the first address as default. As a result, for the two received MM7_deliver.REQs, the SP processes the message only based on the address of the first message receiver, thus the message could not be respectively processed according to different receivers, e.g. be delivered to different receivers.